Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

I break the answer to that question down into three engines: Viral - this is the business model identified in the presentation as "Get Users." Paid - if your product monetizes customers better than your competitors, you have the opportunity to use your lifetime value advantage to drive growth.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. Thanks to Suns amazing PR blitz, there was tremendous demand for experts on Java, and I did my best to convince people that I was one of that mythical breed.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Your most powerful growth engine is your existing customer. Two studies have shown that only about 10 percent of promoters actually refer profitable new customers. Some of the most creative technology coming out of Silicon Valley is designed to do exactly that. That’s right. You have to make it easy for them to do so.

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Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

VC’s engineered financial transactions, working with entrepreneurs to brand, hype and take public un profitable companies with grand promises of the future. Customer Development , Agile Engineering and the Lean methodology enforced a process of incremental and iterative development. Lessons Learned.

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Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

My colleagues Sebastian Soler , Steven Greenberg and I recently launched a new online community, PEVCTech.com , exclusively for PE/VC investors; engineers who work at PE/VC funds; and other technologists who specialize in working on this problem. Many tools designed for B2B marketing in general are also relevant to investors.

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Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

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Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 263

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 26, 2012

But in Menlo Park, every commute is highly variable, no matter how short, and so I often found myself sitting in traffic, bored, and eager to get to my desk to work on whatever engineering problem I was obsessed with. It's a wide-ranging call-in show that covers just about every topic you can imagine.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Although customers didnt flock to this offering at first, we had enough of a developer program active to start recruiting early adopters to start creating 3D objects for sale in our catalog. That engine of creativity has led to a catalog of something like 2 million virtual goods authored by a hundred thousand developers.

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Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

Frederick Terman, Stanford’s Dean of Engineering, enlisted Stanford University as a major arms suppliers in this war. Stanford as a Center of Microwave and Electronics In 1946 after running the military’s secret 800 person Electronic Warfare Lab at Harvard, Fred Terman returned to Stanford as the dean of the engineering schoo l.

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Silicon Valley RSS Europe Germany 157

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

The Message Sitting around a conference room table brainstorming messages that might resonate with customers, or worse having a PR agency doing that for you, is a firing offense in a small company. You should be brainstorming messages with current and potential customers. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 185

crowdSPRING Blog

MARCH 15, 2013

These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Bad Customer Development Questions and How to Avoid My Mistakes – [link]. Bad Customer Development Questions and How to Avoid My Mistakes – [link].

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Social Media Small Business Design Media 105

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

Whats striking about these stories, if you get past the PR hype, are two very important themes: These prodigies were self-taught, and had a fundamental fascination with technology from a very young age. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2010

The higher the vanity ratio, the more effective the PR. And the kinds of failures that do get airtime are usually failures to adequately plan, anticipate, or design in advance. It helps companies with PR. And companies crave positive PR and control over their message – all for rational reasons.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Metrics PR 167

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

The quintessential California couple, they stood out in our crowd as the engineer (in his late 20′s, respected by his peers and the customer) had hair down to his shoulders, sharply contrasting with the military crewcuts of the customers and most of the other contractors. Or is it just someones end of innocence ?

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Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 191

crowdSPRING Blog

NOVEMBER 2, 2012

These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Using mTurk to interview 100 customers (in 4 hours) | Customer Development Labs - [link]. Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!

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Social Media Small Business Design Media 93

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

In a startup, these channels of communication are critical to understand for advertising, launch and PR purposes. But beyond the obvious, its also important to know where customers go to get answers to pressing questions. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 17, 2010

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. ► May (3) Thank you Philosophy Helps Start-Ups Move Faster (WSJ on the. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 8, 2010

This "success theater" is occasionally useful for PR or getting through a tough board meeting. This "success theater" is occasionally useful for PR or getting through a tough board meeting. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 121

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Announce a new product, start its PR campaign, and engage in buzz marketing activities. Marketing launch) Make a new product available to customers in the general public. Do your customers really read TechCrunch? Do some Customer Development instead. Spend your time with renewable sources of customers and iterate.

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San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 7, 2008

This is completely analogous to the situation elsewhere on the internet, where launching a new website, product, or service with PR is getting harder and harder. Customers and prospects are overwhelmed by the number of media and companies clamoring for their attention. Acqusition competition is how new apps get new customers.

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San Francisco Lean Retention SEM 68

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 24, 2009

Some highlights, at least for me: We experienced a great science experiment for the scenario: what would happen if a big company tries to compete with you given complete knowledge about your idea and designs? What happened when we got early press (circa 2004) in violation of our own no-PR rule. That led to much shorter (and better!)

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 74

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

When people (ok, engineers) who have been trained in this model enter most startups, they quickly get confused. How can we do split-testing when we have only a pathetically small number of customers ? After you’ve spent months on a painstaking new design, who wants to be told what color blue to use?

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San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

Engineers are offenders in this category too, but so is any gender-segregated activity, like an all-female PR or marketing team. I have personally taught many “non-technical&# people to program – graphic designers, QA folks, even artists and animators. Contrast that with a traditional siloed department.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Sweden Continuous Deployment 167

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

If you believed the opinions in the marketing department, the customers were in science, engineering, color desktop publishing, and a variety of applications with no single industry or application dominating the list. Within these applications how did our customers spend their day? Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer.

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Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 192

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

PR and publicity drive attention…to drive sales. It is simply getting customers. Startups are designed for astronomical growth. An Epic List of 100 Growth Hacks for Startups by Search Engine Journal. This is where engineering and product teams can drive a ton of growth that traditional marketing cannot.”.

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Retention Metrics Acquisition Conversion 48

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

They have many, many man-years of development and customer development in them. ” So I’m looking at it, and the first thing I think is the design is simple. Edwin: Would I be able to attract other people if the design would be different? Jason: Some people think the design matters a lot more than that.

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Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

I used a freelance web designer and I only created the core functions to create, send, and manage invoices. Further functions such as expense tracking, recurring invoicing, and quoting were on my development list but I waited with the implementation until I was able to prove that my customers were interested in these additions.

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Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

The Next Web

JANUARY 27, 2013

Amazed at all the beautifully designed products that came out of only 76 hours. People told me it was impossible to have our product launch featured on one of the top tech blogs without spending $3,000 on some fancy PR agency. I was not very happy with my life, but didn’t really know why. I found this a real waste of time and energy.

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Netherlands Technical Review Software Review Cofounder 159

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

Journalists, PR firms, investors, and the public at large love a scrappy come-from-behind story about two guys in a garage who figured out how to take down Goliath. Customer Development : a disciplined approach to finding out if there is a market for your product before its too late. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

We go to mixers, buy fancy offices, focus on PR, and try to one-up each other. Instead, lets focus on building companies that matter , on creating real value for customers, and learning. Google was not the first search engine, but it's the one that succeeded. I think its wasteful. In time, success will come.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

The best composition is probably one engineer whose passion lies in the pixels on the screen and another engineer whose passion is making bits fly really fast through servers. is it really that the only people who can build great startups are engineers? Engineers don’t always have the best business ideas.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

The ESL equipment were racks of the latest semiconductors designed into a system so complicated that the mean-time-between-failure was measured in days. Before leaving California, the engineers gave me a course in this specialized receiver design. It had no PR agency. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Washington 273

Duct Tape Marketing

MARCH 1, 2016

Search Engine Optimization – This includes on page and off page optimization activities aimed at generating organic search engine traffic. Promoting your referral program that supports local non-profits is a great way to use PR to enhance your referral program. Let’s say you sell a pretty standard $4,000 web design package.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

Even worse, entrepreneurs are faced with a constant barrage of vanity metrics from competitors and other companies engaged in PR. My point is that this article does not contain the kind of information we’d need to draw reasonable inferences, which is by design. The PR firm helpfully left out that context.)

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Metrics Lean PR 154

market-by-numbers.com

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Market By Numbers on Twitter | Entries RSS | Comments RSS Market By Numbers High-Tech Marketing and Customer Development Home What is Customer Development? The driving force helps shape technology choices, importance of design, market segment, and business model as well as company culture, growth plan and exit strategy.

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San Diego RSS Lean Elevator Pitch 40

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

Every marketing communication hire couldn’t wait to produce the next great ad or PR program. And the same time we were also going to do all the other strategic stuff about pricing, positioning, promotion and customer discovery and validation to help engineering understand customer needs. But sales came first. (By

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Silicon Valley RSS Non-Compete California 127

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2008

You could try and drive home that positioning with an expensive PR campaign, superbowl ads, and whatnot. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? So you decide to try to reposition around a different value proposition, one that more closely matches what your product is best at.

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